Comments on: Will more companies halt SAP projects?

By: Eric Kimberling

Eric Kimberling — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 01:19:42 +0000

Good post. It’s unfortunate, but sometimes it takes a bad economy in order for companies to rationalize their investments in ERP and other technologies. Even in good times, companies like Select Comfort, Hershey, etc. shouldn’t be implementing SAP if they can’t stay on time, on budget, and deliver measurable business benefits to the organization. Hopefully the trend toward demanding a rational return on investment in ERP technology will last long after the recession ends.

Eric Kimberling
Panorama Consulting Group
http://www.panorama-consulting.com

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business implementation strategy — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 05:33:21 +0000

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By: Peter K

Peter K — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:38:03 +0000

It is not only that SAP projects are stopped or delayed. If you look at the example at hand, you see that basically the complete company would run under SAP: SAP ERP, CRM, SCM, PLM, SRM, HCM, SEM, BI and enterprise portal: sales, production, purchase, human capital, enterprise management, reporting. However, as customers in Germany recently found out, this can be an expensive undertaking or at least it is difficult to calculate.

The main reason of complains in the last weeks was, that these companies, with a turnover between 1 and 10 billion Euro, had done exactly the same: build the IT completely on SAP. As most IT related people know, such an architecture can not be changed over night. A replacement would take years and cost millions. So what do you do ? -> You sign the new maintenance contract if you can not afford a frozen system !

That was what the trouble in Germany was about, as reported by these customers in Düsseldorf on December 10th, 2008.

By: John Sicard

John Sicard — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:59:36 +0000

I might add that this phenomenon may extend to all other “large” ERP providers with “large” budget projects spanning “long” periods of time. As you stated in your post, “The recession, however, changed everything”. Under such uncertain times, Enterprises will be more inclined to invest in strategic solutions to better weather the storm. In such a case, rapid time to value will be key. We may very well see a shift in focus from tactical execution improvements (usually translates to large ERP projects/upgrades spanning months/years) to dramatically improving the their competency in “sense and respond”, where best-of-bread vendors have long had the upper hand on ERP providers.